Present Model for Sustainable Investing is Deeply Flawed with Robert Rubinstein #8

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to Redefining Tomorrow. It is here where we're going to be taking a look at variety of topics that will help to improve how we live in the future for all species on this planet. And there's a saying that I've lived by most of my life, which is, you can't fix yesterday, you can only create tomorrow. So we're going to be creating tomorrow, today with a fantastic topic. The present model for sustainable investing is deeply flawed. Oh, my God, what an amazing topic. And we have the perfect person on today, Robert Rubenstein. How are you, Robert?

I'm very well. Thank you, David, for inviting me.

Robert's got an amazing past and I'll just give you a few points. First of all, he's been in the ESG space and in impact investing for 25 years. He's got about 40,000 people in his network. But what really is amazing is through a series of events, random occurrences, we ended up connecting and talking. And one of the items that is interested me at any time I talk about ESG or the impact space, and if I bring up Robert's name, everybody says, oh, oh, he's amazing. So the reputation precedes him. And I'm so glad he's on the line. I do want to share with everybody who's listening right now that the letters esg, they stand for environmental, social and Governance. If you've not heard that, those that acronym before and potentially Robert can get into that. So let's get started. Robert, do you have an outline for us?

Yes, I do.

Okay, can you give it to me, please?

Yes. I have several points that I'd like to cover. Basically, the topic of sustainable vestment is deeply flawed in spite of all the rah Rah.

Okay, let's say is deeply flawed in spite of the rah rah. Okay, Next.

Number two, don't believe the press releases.

Yes, believe the press releases. Next.

Where are we and where do we want to be? Are we next 25 years. What has actually been achieved?

Wow. Next.

The forces pushing ESG and impact.

SG and impact. Next.

Sustainable investment. An overview of true opportunities.

And Next.

And the consequences for not embracing it.

I'm assuming that was the last one. Is there one more? Is that it, number seven?

No, that was it. The last one was basically opportunities. But that's really.

That's perfect. That works in there. Okay, so, Robert, I'm looking. Teach me. I want to learn as much as I can from you. So let's start with this. Number one, the space Being deeply flawed in spite of the rah. Rah.

Yeah, it's. I mean there isn't any major publication that you pick up and it's always, it kind of peaks around Davos, particularly in the last couple of years. Every time around Davos everybody's pushing out press releases that Apple Computer is going to be, oh, sorry, Microsoft is going to be carbon negative and they will have sucked out all of the CO2 of the world since their inception by 2050. So I don't know where you're going to be in 2050. I have no idea. No one is going to call them in 2050 to say, hey, you missed your target. So it's a meaningless thing. Statement. It's meaningless because no one will check it and it's far too often to the future. But everyone is pushing out press releases about, you know, BlackRock and the response, the Roundtable for. Responsible for the Roundtable for business in America that we now have to have purpose. But these are press releases, these are announcements which give them a nice, you know, fuzzy glow. But I'm a guy from Brooklyn, I'm pretty down to earth. I just look at where's the money flows going? Are the money flows going to things that worsen or at best maintain the social environmental imbalance or balance or are they going to actually improve it? And most of the time their money is not going. I mean the four largest banks in the U.S. the mega banks there, account for 30 to 40% of all fossil fuel investments in lobbying.

Really?

Yeah. So everybody knows what they're actually doing because if you're a banker, you're an investment banker and you're pulling down, I don't know, 500k a year or 600k or whatever it is and you can close a deal on a coal fired power plant in, in the Philippines or Indonesia and your bonus is going to be one and a half million for that. That's your incentive. And those are relatively easy loans because you've probably done it a dozen times.

You check the boxes, you check the boxes on what's necessary. It's done. You've seen the plant, they've put into 50 of them already. So let's just process this.

Yeah. And then all of a sudden this other guy, Dave Goldsmith, head of the Equator Principles, which is basically an agreement not to do project finance without looking at environmental risk assessment, all of a sudden comes in, sorry Hank, we can't do that loan. So what do you mean you can't do that loan? We sign the Equator Principles, we have to live up to that. So this doesn't meet that. Yeah, but I'm going to lose a $1.5 million bonus. I'm getting. I'm quitting. I'm out of here. I'm going to go work for a bank that doesn't give a shit about this. So this whole nonsense about, you know, commitment, these aspirational statements like the Principles for Responsible Investing, the Carbon Disclosure Project, these are aspirational statements? These are, I would like to be a ski bum, but I'm not a ski bum. You know, it's those type of silly statements. I call it the. Basically, everybody wants a membership card to the fitness club without getting on the exercise machine. And if you look at.

I want to jump in because I don't know if you know the name Amy Domini.

Sure, I do. Very well. She's a very dear friend.

Okay. Amy Domini and I were walking down the street in New York. I don't know, it probably was 15 years ago. I can look it up, but I'm making a guess. And I remember one statement she shared with me and at the time, she was in the top three investment in social responsible ESG type initiatives. It wasn't called that back then. And she said, david, everybody wants all of these initiatives. However, when it comes to their personal savings and their future and their retirement, they don't put the money into these areas because we don't have those large returns. So they tell you out loud that they want to invest in this and it's important. But when it comes to their personal savings, at that point it was, let's put it in Exxon because they had a high return. So, yeah, this has been going on for a very long time. How in your own. And I don't know if you plan on covering it, but this is the question I had is when or how did social responsibility promotion from organizations really start to ramp up? Where did you see it and how did it initiate? Even though you're not, you're saying it's just hype.

Well, the money flows according to the definition used by the sif, the Social Investment Forums, the US sif, the UK sif, the Euro, sif, all of the social investment forums, these are trade associations to promote SRI social responsible investing. So if you look at their statistics and they're claiming 30 to 35 trillion or 40 trillion going into that space, using their definition, yes, those money flows are going in there. But are they having actually any impact? Because what is the definition of an ESG investment? How is it Determined who determines that? What does it mean? How are we measuring that? So I think you only have to look at something called the Montreal Pledge because most of the other agreements of Principal Responsible Investment and Carbon Disclosure Project are aspirational statements. They are not true, serious commitments. The Montreal Pledge is quite fascinating because it's asking all asset managers to disclose the carbon risk of their investments. That's very different from an aspirational statement. That's actually, you know, pull up the kimono, let's see what you got over there. So when you look at that, you can go to their website, montrealpledge.org and you look at who signed that pledge. So lots of European pension funds, asset managers, one or two pension fund in the United States and some in Asia. Not a single major US asset manager signed. Not one. Not even Al Gore and David Blood, who started Generation Investment, whose whole raison d' etre is climate and two theories. Why didn't they sign one? Compliance, liability, all this other garbage that Americans always hide behind so they don't have to make any tough decisions or. Which is, I think, the real reason you can have an ESG fund, but it doesn't mean that it's carbon neutral or carbon zero. It could be carbon really intensive because the methodology used for the terming ESG is not based on, you know, carbon intensity. So that's why I look at things like that, you know, and you're a, you know, you're a scientist, you look at the facts, you don't look at what people aspire to. And that's been one of the problems. I remember when we started, the methodology used for determining what, what is a social responsible investing or a company was what I call the O.J. simpson method. If I don't actually have a video of you murdering your wife, you're innocent. And that was the methodology used in the past, which was. I send you a questionnaire as a company and I'm the ESG or SRI analyst. You fill it in, that shows self assessment and then I check it by looking at LexisNexis and whatever media sources. So it's self assessment with control by ignorance. Because as you know, the media can only discover a forest fire happening. They can't discover a can of gasoline next to a burning cigarette, which is what most investors want to know. What is my risk for that once the fire starts? Okay, I can see that, but that's been, that was the, the methodology used before. Now it's gotten a bit better. But fundamentally, the issue that's wrong with the Present system is. And I was, I remember I was visiting a family office in Singapore and they wanted to meet with me and they were quite a big family office. I opened up the door to my shock and horror. On the wall is a big plaque. Coal trading, oil trading, gas trading. But that's, that's where this family made their money. That's how they made the money. But now they want to move away from that. They move, want to move away from carbon intensive industry. So, and very serious about it. They've been studying it. They really want. And they said to me, Robert, we don't understand this. How is it possible that the most toxic companies score so well on the sustainability indexes of Dow Jones or ftse? BP shall score very high on the sustainability indexes which are used by some investors to determine whether I will invest or not invest in the company. If you look at companies like PepsiCo, one of the leading benefactors of diabetes in America, score also very high. Unilever, what do they make? Processed food and toxic cosmetics with massive use of palm oil. So these companies score high on ESG rankings because the methodology used is not what the company does. This is important. It's not what the company does, it's.

Can you explain that? Can you give me some details as how you're, as you make that statement? What are you breaking down?

Well, what I'm saying is that the analyst who collects the information, whether from publicly reported annual reports from the company or research that they've done, they're looking at what the company reports. They're not analyzing the fact that PepsiCo makes a lot of money and Coco makes a lot of money pushing diabetes or that's the end result of their product. They don't look at that, they look at what they report. So who reports? Well, these big companies, they report well. But their core activity in the case of BP and Shell is CO2 emissions. Virgin. Richard Branson, who always looks at pushes himself as the great champion of sustainability. What is his core business? CO2 Virgin Airlines. He kept talking about making virgin fuels and plant based aviation fuels. He invested nearly nothing into a company to push that and then it shut down because it ran out of money. And he never really developed alternative aviation fuels. So people don't have to understand the methodology used now is not what the company does. What is the end product, the value add to society that these products provide. They look at what the company reports. That's a very, very important issue. The other important issue to understand from the pension fund point of view is the whole Issue of engagement. So you'll see if you look at the figures of the 30, $35 trillion, a lot of that is considered ESG because we're engaging with the company. And what does that mean? You're Shell or BP or Exxon and I am Hermes or Robeco, one of the engagement companies. The pension fund hires me to go talk to you and say, dave, your competitors are doing a better job and you're ExxonMobilizing. So you're Ray Tillerson, I think his name was at the time.

Yep, Tillerson.

Ray is.

It's not Ray, it's. But yeah, Tillerson is good enough.

Tillerson. And he says, dave, Joe, we make more money than any of the other oil majors. We have the best HRM policy, we have the lowest CO2 emissions for BTU, and the share price is good. This was before the crisis and all of that. What are you talking about? So this idea. But you can tick the box as the pension fund saying, oh, I'm engaging. And several years ago it was really even worse because there was a documentary about where the Dutch pension funds were investing their money. And to the shock and horror of the pensioners, they saw that the pension funds were not checking where they're putting their money and they were investing indirectly into cluster bomb manufacturers. In two years time, the total assets committed to ESG in the Netherlands went from 46 billion to about close to 500 billion. I think it was 486 or something like that billion which any mathematician or civilized intelligent person, how could you go up a factor of 10 in two years if you're doing it properly? And what they did is they kicked out the cluster bar manufacturers. If the pension fund had 5 billion and we had 2 million of the 5 billion in cluster bar manufacturers, we can now claim that the 5 billion is an ESG fund.

Oh, yeah, just. It's a reallocation of the funding.

Right. But it's an aggregation. So you're claiming the 5 billion is ESG because you kicked out 2 million and worse is. Do you know how many listed cluster bomb manufacturers there are in the world? No, I don't. And how. What is the total market of those companies? But it's like, you know, it's like the whales. I used to be on the board of a foundation which was the lead part of the leading green bank in the Netherlands called ASN Bank. And we were having a discussion and I saw that they kicked out a Japanese supermarket chain, Takashi Maya, I think it was. And I said, well, why did you Kick them out. I said, well, they sell well meat. What do you mean they sell well? Yeah, in little cans. They sell whale meat in the department store. I said, how much whale meat can they sell in those, you know, little cans? It doesn't matter. We have a hundred percent ban on investing in companies that make money on whale meat. Okay. And then I asked them, do you probably have a ban on whale investing in cigarettes? Absolutely, 100% banned. I said, but you invest in supermarkets whose percentage of sales from cigarettes dwarf whale meat sales from Japanese department stores. And then they said to me, yeah, it's. It's a work in progress.

It's a justification of the position that they're in.

Yeah.

And so because I've got so many questions. I've got so many questions for you, and I want to jump back a little bit, maybe this can add some clarity on my side, and I don't know how. I have three different points and we'll address one at a time, but I will give them all at once. You might be able to integrate them. The first thing I've been saying to people for a long time, and it's not whether I'm 100% ecological, it's not my. I'm not making a political statement or a environmental statement is that when anybody says that this company is environmental or is following certain guidelines, I say, okay, so they're making a product that does X. Does the rest of their system, their structure, their back end, follow that same course? Meaning do they check their supply chain? Maybe in the process of manufacturing or doing that Service? They have 15 different companies who violate every single position that would make that actually a sustainable, deliverable. So that if you have a supply chain that is not. And you say you are, you're still not, because it feeds into the system. The second one goes to this B Corporation, the same. I sat in a B Corporation meeting in Hong Kong while I was living there, and one of the things, don't.

Get me started on B Corp and the B Corporate.

When they gave the list, I said, oh, my God, you could fake half of these. You can pretend on almost. You can make a justification for any of these to sound good, but you're actually not.

It's even worse than that. It's much worse because I know the founders of B Corp. And I called them up and they say, hey, dude, how come you don't publish? You've gotten probably $30 million in grants and donations, maybe more over the years because you're a nonprofit, supposedly. How come you never publish Your annual report online, like most foundations. Oh, he said, if you want, you know, form. I forgot the tax form that this. I said to him, no, you should be putting it online. And then I asked their European head, you know, can you send me the report? And then he said, why do you want it? Who is it for? What are you going to do with it? And I said, okay, B Corp wants full transparency of everybody else, but not themselves. No transparency of themselves. And personally, I felt the B Corp model was the virgin brand model, which is basically, I'm not going to invest a penny in you. You're going to pay me to use my brand. You're going to use the brand and pay me every year to use a brand, but you're also going to build my brand, which means it's a complete circular loop. Right. Paying me to.

Yeah, it's a gamification of all of this. So I have something in front of me and I was going to bring it, talk about it later. The United nations came out with a report in 2015. And not that everything has to be trusted, not that everything's correct, but something that I somewhat scientifically, in my own analysis, come to believe is that no matter what any company does, no industry is profitable. If you input all environmental costs, there's no way that you can make an industry profitable. So the challenge becomes, and I'd like you to go back, what got you engaged in this? I think that's a. You and I have never spoken about this. What made you. You're living in the Netherlands now. What got you engaged in esg? Bring me up to speed a little bit so I know where you're coming from when you promote talk, try to fulfill this model because we're talking about its flaws and you've been working at this for 25 years, so.

Yeah, well, prior to that, believe it or not, in the previous life, I used to work on oil rigs in Iran, drilling for. Drilling for oil and gas for a French air drilling company. So I saw firsthand of the pollution and also worked in the North Sea. I saw, you know, what was going on there and that, you know, I stopped that after a while. It was a nice experience, but not my life and not what I was. I was looking for something more purpose. I started Bicycle Spare part import. That led me to create the first bicycle magazine in the Netherlands, which led to two other publications. The last publication was the first European a magazine on sustainability in 1995. Prior to that, I started a cooking magazine and I. That was a big mistake. Financially and spiritually. Because the only people who advertise in cooking magazines are processed foods. Oh really?

Yeah.

Once in a, once in a while you'll get a tomato campaign or an avocado campaign or something. But in Europe it's mainly processed food. So I was pushing the idea of the magazine. How to make a meal with fresh ingredients in 30 minutes is good for the consumer, but you're not going to get any advertisers for that. Maybe somebody makes pots. So I was pushing something that they didn't really like. And then I heard about the Social Venture network and I went there, I said, wow, there's a whole group of people that are trying to integrate profits and principles. And that got my attention. And I was good at the chess game of magazines. And that's when I led me to make Source, which was the first European management magazine on sustainability. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong investors, so they pulled the plug while we were on holiday. But I still wanted to create an economy based on well being and basically change the financial system ultimately to make it work for all. So I figured I needed to get the business community on board to do that. They will only change if they feel excruciating pain continuing the direction they're going. And I chose one of the three pain buttons, which was finance, personnel and reputation. I tried teaching MBA students. If you want to change business, refuse to work for them when they recruit you if they don't align with your values. That was very slow. And most of the students didn't follow their heart. And then I chose finance. I looked at who had all the money in 95. 98. Sorry, 98. And Japanese government pension fund and UPS and AXA, the large ones had the top 100, had direct or indirect control of about 20, 25% of all the assets. So I figured I only have to convince 100 guys CIOs. So that's how I kind of led me in this direction. I was always kind of mission driven. I always felt, you know, I was. Injustice was very kind of my hot red flag or hot button that would kind of get me quite motivated to do was this.

When you were a kid you felt this way.

Okay, yeah, always. Yeah, I always had that. Maybe from my parents growing up in Brooklyn. They were, you know, they survived the holocaust, came to the us, fled from Europe to the United States via Palestine. And I grew up in Brooklyn. But I always felt that feeling of what's the right thing, whatever the right thing is. And I just didn't, it didn't feel Right. I didn't know the financial sector very well, but I, I dove in headfirst and I got to understand the mentality one of the advantage of the financial sector because it's very, very powerful, it's very predictable. It's the most predictable group of alpha males you'll ever meet. They rarely surprise. And because I only needed to convince a small number, I figured hey, I could do this with very little resources. I only have to convince 100 guys, you know, or the equivalent. And that kind of led me on the path of doing TBLI and doing events to help educate those asset owners and managers. I was a bit surprised it took so long. But you know, as the financial sector is predictable but also it's very hard to get access. So the more zeros someone has in assets, the more isolated they are, you know. Jeff Bezos doesn't have a sign on his house. Hi Dave, I have billions come visit me. The access is a challenge. The convincing is very easy because of the predictability. And we always, when we started 25 years ago, there was no PRI or CDP or impact investing or GIN or any of these institutions. So we had to basically create a gasoline fire. You know, it looks, burns really bright but it goes out very fast to give the impression that there is a big market. Now there's a big market that goes.

Back to this, this rah rah. My life growing up, you probably when passed. I grew up in Middletown, New York. 17 Going into the Catskills and my father left. They got out of before the Nazis really took over. And my grandmother was Hungarian and my grandfather Belarusian Russian. But we didn't have any of these type of discussions yet. I had not, I'm not say purpose driven. I always felt that feeling that people are people or animals need to be they have something more. Even though my whole history is butchers on my cattle dealers in my father's side. But this going back, let's digress. Sorry, is this rah rah getting on this flawed? So you're saying that it's flawed because of the metrics or it's flawed because of the people or it's flawed because there's really no, there's really, really really really no way to actually make it.

Sustainable or all of the weights because most of the world, a lot of people don't understand. Everybody thinks that all the companies in the world are on the stock market. And you always have to explain to them no, very, very few companies are actually on the stock market. Most are small and medium sized enterprises who get their funding from. From other sources, not from the stock market, but most of the world. I guess it's probably between 65, 75% of portfolios are invested in liquid assets, stocks and bonds and things like that. Maybe because of regulatory issues. I don't really believe that in the way that you're looking at ESG now, whether it's engagement, I'm going to chat with a company and see if I can change their behavior or shifting my assets from Exxon Mobil to Cisco, that we're going to create an economy based on well being. I don't believe that.

This is a go to that I've often used when I'm talking about the flaw in the system is I know several people involved in some type of environmental or animal rights or whatever. And with this one woman that I'm friends with, she has been involved in the circular economy for years. And we're traveling one day in a taxi cab and I the best time to ask someone a question like this is when it's private. Private. And I leaned over and I said, I got a question for you. How's it working for you? And her response shocked me. She said, it isn't. I don't feel like we've made any progress. With all the news we hear now, I always jump to 7.5 billion people. So that was shocking. But then I realized why she said that. I didn't push her on it because I knew that was the answer she was going to give. You can ask anybody. Saving, cleaning the oceans, CO2, the atmosphere. You ask them privately, they'll always say to you, it's not working. It's always the reply. We're having dinner, she, her husband and myself, and as we're sitting in this nice restaurant, I tell her, just order what you'd like. And she's taking care of the order while I'm talking to her husband. And she orders a fish meal, a chicken meal and a beef meal. I'm saying, okay, that's interesting. Yet through the entire meal, she never asked the restaurant, how do they take care of their plastics, their materials or whatever. So she's talking about it and promoting it. Yet her lifestyle doesn't match the directive that she wants.

No.

So I mean, is it deeply flawed because it can't be done?

No, no, no. First of all, if we look at, let's say that the figures of the trade associations, the US SIF and Euro SIF, all those figures are accurate of $35 trillion in ESG commitment, which is what you'll see a lot of the press releases because most of the journalists, they don't check shit, they just process it. So if that's true, why is it that we have such a mess on climate change, biodiversity loss, water shortage, food shortage, health crisis, diabetes, income inequality, pollution, threats of war. You've got all this money supposedly fixing the economy, but either either the amounts are not accurate or the definition is wrong, or we have to double down and it has to be much, much more or we. It's what I believe it is, it's just going slower in the wrong direction and we need to basically take a different approach and I think more in the illiquid space and you know, real estate retrofits, public transport, infrastructure, forest, micro private equity. I think that's where you can retool the economy. I don't really believe that in liquid assets, particularly the way it's done now, that we're really going to change anything. Because if you look at even just the engagement side, which all these pension funds love to say, we're ESG compliant because we're talking to them, you know, first of all, are you, why are you doing this? Why are you doing esg? Is it doing it because it's popular and it's the flavor of the month and you want Dave to think that hey, I'm a good guy. Or are you doing this to reduce risk, improve your share price? Or are you doing this really to fundamentally change the economy, to make it more based on well being, which is what would benefit all of us? Because if you're looking to do that, you should not be doing engagement the way it is now. You should invest in the worst of class, in the small and mid cap and use sustainability as the guideline and change the management and improve the quality of that.

I don't think that's even. I honestly don't think that individuals by and large can get a grasp of what that actually means. I've got a home here with renovations. It's let's say 400 square meter, 4,000 square feet. When Covid hit, everybody talked about how the world was changing, but then looked at energy usage and it's only down a few points because everybody's now at home running their air conditioning for their homes. They're doing the same thing that they had. There's just a transference. I saw, I don't know if you saw this the other day, satellite imagery for the last 11 months in the rainforest. That 303,000 square miles of the rainforest were cut in the past 11 months. If you went back the 12 months before that, it was 1750 square miles. And so I don't think that the individuals who you're talking about saying, what do you really want to invest in? Is it well being, is it good, is it reducing, is it getting shareholder value? I think there's just a very difficult means by which to get your minds around the entire real scope of what a purpose driven or an ESG means.

I don't agree with you there. I think if you don't want to. I once said to a big endowment in the Netherlands and he said to me years ago, he said, you know, I'm not going to do it well, but I'm going to start doing ESG and impact investing and each year I'll try to do it better. So he says to his wealth manager, hey, let's start with the easiest. Let's do index tracking, okay? Oh no, we can't do that. The wealth manager said, you're going to lose performance. I said, okay, I'll look for another wealth manager who can do it. All of a sudden that wealth manager could do it because they didn't want to lose the client. And several years after that, each year trying to do better and better. He says to me, you know Robert, it's really not that hard to do if you want to do it, but it's incredibly hard to do if you don't want to do it. So I don't really believe that it's not possible. I think it's really just an educational issue. If you want to decarbonize your portfolio. The lowest, easiest, lowest risk with the highest impact is public transport infrastructure. It's a 2, $300 billion investment every year from all of the various public transport systems. It's mainly low to zero carbon, their public private partnerships AA rated, steady cash flow, no volatility and not a big technology risk. If you want to do it, do that. Ask any of your investment friends. When was the last conversation around public transport infrastructure as a strategy for decarbonizing portfolios? Because they don't even think about it. Everybody's looking for these sexy stupid hedge fund garbage that had to that never really reached their performance. All of these.

Maybe you have a different I hear where you're coming from. I did. I worked with the. I forgot which transportation authority for the United States. There's an association and during my research what I found was that the this more or less most cities, communities and states in the United States are fighting two battles. There's the battle of the road industry, the automotive industry, the road industry, and then everybody else. So when they go to war, the road industry is armed with finance beyond imagination. But the light rail, rail systems, the ferries, the boats, all of the other miscellaneous options that are available don't get the visibility. And I remember reading or talking to the people in Vancouver and they don't have a road or an other. They have a transportation authority. And the transportation authority is supposed to figure out the best means, no matter what it is, to transport people. And that's where the balance comes. But when you pit in the United States, at least I don't know how it is globally, because this was only a program that I was doing in the U.S. the United States pits roads against others. So you're always going to see the road people win. And that becomes a challenge because we're talking now, we're starting to see the electric side. And there are challenges on that whole front too. What is your take globally when it comes to transportation in that perspective?

Well, I look at the amount of money going into public transportation infrastructure and the road. If you go to Asia and you live there, the roads are full.

Yeah. And I've lived there for 10 years, they're full.

They cannot manage this growth just with building more roads and cars and at the same time try to stick to 2 degrees centigrade. So there will be much more money going into public transport infrastructure. If I look at Europe, if I look at Asia, one of the unfortunate things is that there's only. My friend who ran the MTR sustainability department of MTR told me that there's only Hong Kong in Hong Kong. Yeah. He said to me, there's only two lines in the entire world of high speed rail that makes money. Only two.

Yeah, I would believe that.

Well, that's it. So most of them don't make money. But because we're not pricing carbon at where it should be, which would be a simple solution. If you buy a bicycle in the Netherlands, there's 21% sales tax. In Sweden, it's 25% sales tax. If you buy an airplane ticket, there's no sales tax. So you're getting this massive subsidy for the airline industry, who always lose money anyway, and you're just allowing this cheap travel. But as if people are serious and the governments are really serious and start pricing carbon. And industry knows carbon is going to cost 40, 50, 100, $200 a ton.

I lived in, living in Hong Kong, the MTR is absolutely amazing. But one reason you use it is there's a Lot of traffic. While I lived in Luxembourg, you could not get anywhere without a vehicle. Without a vehicle. So yes, I hear your argument and I hear that there's a simple fix, but we know the simple fix is not going to be put in place, at least probably not in our lifetimes. And I hear that you're saying there's poss that for example, in China they need these rail systems and they need the light rail and all of those other means, yet in a few years they put in these high speed rails all through China, billions of dollars, they're going to have to replace them or repair them almost simultaneously at the same time because they're all going to wear the same way. But they couldn't run them at full speed because no one could afford to stay on to use them at their speed capacity. So I understand that it's simple and it's a simple fix with carbon, but my statement was I don't think we're going to get there. And you're saying we will.

No, I think we could get there. I don't know if we will because there's very little political leadership to say, sorry David, you're not going to be able to go with EasyJet for 12 Euro from London to Amsterdam or from London to Paris. It's not your right. We're going to start taxing carbon intensive activity. Everything will have a carbon cost. I would like to see a cap and share system where everyone gets a carbon allowance so it's doable, but I don't see the political leadership to really do it. Maybe Covid and the Green New Deal will give a stimulus, but there's a lot of big interests that like to keep the status quo.

I don't even go there. I look at, I use the number 7.5. If you ever heard, heard any of my audios, I always use 7.5 billion people. I've worked in the Philippines, I've worked in Bangladesh, I've worked in India, I've worked in Indonesia, I've worked in South Africa, I've worked in. I mean you go around the world. If you take 7.5 billion people, I don't think not just political will, you need a global will and it's not as important. There's a woman in China that I'm very good friends with and she takes a 20 minute to 15 minute shower every single day, every day. And I say to her, you don't need a 20 minute shower. And she said why? She knew I live in Hong Kong, but she would say to Me? Why do you say that I can't do it? You've done it your whole life. You've had this. Because she's seen the media, the movies, all of these, this visual lifestyle that's possible, and she now wants it for herself. And she said, you can't tell me I can't live that lifestyle. So. And if you can't get one person to make a change, it's going to be tough to make the rest of the world understand, because the world is very challenged. So let's, let's go. I'm going to look at the outline very quickly first. So deeply flawed. We have flaws in measurement, we have flaws in perception. We have several flaws that. And you've even touched on. Don't believe the press releases.

Right.

Is there anything. And on those two, you want to add.

If you listen to the myths of the financial industry until now, they always said impact is a charity. There's no returns, there's no deals, there's money losing. There's no scale, it's too risky. Bad management, no track record. That's what they always said. However, the investment myths are even more grotesque because they always said all investment managers hit their benchmarks. A lie. Private Equity funds earn 30% when. Which ones? Give me a list of those who have. Hedge funds earn 30%. Another lie. And they also would say to me, ESG data is not good enough. If you look at the financial data, it's far worse. Far worse. Look at the China Hustle, the movie, the WorldCom, Enron, Parmalot, Madoff, the financial disaster. Much more money has been lost with crappy financial data, which nobody seems to be bothered about than the inferior ESG data. But this is what we're working with. So now the financial sector has realized, oh, these millennials, they all want to go into esg. The herd wants this, so we'll give them what they want. But it's not really fundamentally improving the environment or society in the way that it's done now. I don't agree that it cannot be done. I do agree with you that people are lazy and the pain that we're facing now is not high enough to change our behavior. No one is really, really suffering in positions of power because of climate. Not yet.

And that's where. When I hear. I love the topic because it's sustainably flawed. Is your. The definitions you're giving me are things that I've already. Not to say that I know everything. Don't take that way. I've already seen or said to myself, you're a little older than me. One of the jumps I always take is I go back to the 1960s in the United States. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. Save the planet, save the world, everybody should love one another. And then I ask individuals, okay, so tell me, who do these people become? They were out there all over saying, let's save the world. What are their jobs today? And they became the investment bankers, the hedge fund managers. They became the same people who have the mega mansions. You have two people living in a home of 15,000 square feet, 1500 square meter. And that to them was sustainability, saving the world and doing everything else. So I'm kind of pushing and saying, do you really, this is more of a personal. Do you really believe it's solvable?

I do, I do. But I mean, you know, what did George Carlin say? Behind every pessimist is a frustrated optimist. Some variation like that. I do believe that if you show people the self interest, opportunity and money flows and you do this over and over and over and over and over again, and you can get access, if you have access to the asset owners, the decision makers, you can get behavioral change. And if you ask anybody, do you want a financial return in a social, environmental, added value, you won't get an answer, no. I want all my money to make life miserable for everybody. And I'm working at that 24 7. Remember when we started, our audience were the Donald Trumps. Our audience were mainly, I say jokingly, irresponsible investors and criminals. And I always like them because they're very predictable. They have a better sense of humor and they have more money and it's not really that hard to change the behavior. I think it is doable and I know it's a very big challenge. And people are selfish and people are lazy. But at the same time, there's also enough people that are looking for some purpose and showing them that they can actually achieve whatever market rate return it is. But I think it's. You have multiple challenges. You have to try to change the behavior of the financial sector. Who doesn't care about this? Most of them don't. They really don't. For them, it's just another product that they are selling to their family offices or their high net worth or whoever. The latest report, UBS found that most of the millennials or have a lot of them don't really care about the social environmental impact. They just care about the financial returns. So I'm not surprised about that. That's the attitude of all investors. So you just have to. Don't shout loudly in Chinese or Mandarin to someone who speaks German. Don't speak. Shout loudly.

You know, this is how you and I met is over this one topic. And just to share outside for people listening is I was on a TBLI event that Robert puts on where they bring in organizations to do pitches over the NOW video type conferencing scenario. And privately I didn't do it on the public Jack. I chatted to Robert.

Nice.

Because of a question which was are you. How are you demonstrating the sustainability Something to that degree. And I wrote back they have not answered the question at all.

No.

And he rarely do. And they. And they barely do because they don't. So let's get on to the next. I think we're on number three. So can you give me because I'm not an expert in this. Where are we and where do we want to be? Give me that picture because I'd like to know like if you were to give it today, where are we and where would we want to be?

Where we are now is the concept of ESG and impact is the flavor of the month and TBLI is an overnight success after 25 years. So we are at the point that people it's the discussions with traditional investors is less about why and more about how. So I have fewer and fewer reason discussions about why, which is why you see so much. Every single major fund manager has new offerings around esg. Okay. As I said, it's going slower in the wrong direction, but at least we're not having the discussion why should we do this? So that's where we are now. The interest, particularly in the liquid space is significant.

You're also saying slap ESG, slap the 717 sustainability UN, slap the B corp. And you've already got a lot of attention and possible money flow.

Well, we don't manage money, so I don't really have directed money flow to us. But there is more and more money going into liquid, mainly liquid space and also in illiquid. And there's many more platforms, many more advisors and the quality of the research has gotten better. And there are several initiatives to give a true sustainable stamp that this is really fundamentally improving society or in the environment. So things have gotten better from the O.J. simpson method, which was the way 25 years ago, the money flows have increased. But what we need basically, if you look at all of those lists I was telling you of the challenges. We need to basically rethink how the economy works. And the financial sector needs to be structured to work for all.

So, but you've said it, you've said it two or three times. It's going backwards.

So it's going in the wrong direction.

When you mean. When you mean wrong direction, what is that specific wrong direction?

That specific wrong direction means that are these 35 trillion or 40 trillion or green bond, all of this stuff that's getting all the press releases, is this money reducing carbon, improving the health of individuals, addressing the water problems, addressing food security, improving health. I mean, the pandemic is just an example of, hey, this is a very unhealthy economic system we have. If something as this virus can shut everything down as a reaction to that, the system is totally flawed and we have to operate in a different way. And I'm glad to see that the Green New Deal in Europe did get through. We'll see where they put the money. I don't think that we're going to be able to address climate in time. I think that we're running out of time because I don't see the fundamental changes in way people live. I mean, it's all marginal. It's like the salami effect slice off a little bit. So nobody knows is anything's missing.

That's. And I don't want to go into details now because I didn't send you the video, but that's what Project Moon Hut is addressing exactly. The foundation, our foundation is addressing exactly these things. Because of the timeline I do often people, when I'm speaking about ESGs and not positive or negative, just going over, I draw on the war behind me. I put a time, I put it to zero T0 and T40. And I say, okay, tell me what's going to happen over the next 40 years? What do you mean? I said 7.5 billion people. Will your project change climate change fast enough?

Yeah.

And they. What do you mean, David? I said this is a race against time. It's not a race against. Do you get the economic impact if seawater level rises 15 cm, 6 inches? Then we will have more flooding all over the world because of tidal surges and warmer water and everything else. And you'll see Beijing, I mean, you'll see Shanghai, you'll see the greater Bay region, you'll see London with the River Thames. You've got all these places that are going to be inundated and Maldives will be gone. So tell me, how are we going to go from 0 to T40 and solve this? And no one has an answer.

No, not in the speed which is that. But at the same time, I do see solutions. I see blue carbon. I saw a solution on eliminating 85% of all CO2 emissions from the entire global beverage system. Instead of shipping around all these stupid bottles back and forth. Fantastic solution. And it works and it's doable.

What's his name? Chris Roofer from MorningStar Packaging, about 40 years ago, came up with the concept or the thought, just like you said, why they in the tomato paste industry? Why are we shipping tomato sauce all the way across these great divides? Fill water, he said, let's dehydrate it, ship the tomato paste and rehydrate it on the other side.

Yeah.

And it saved billions of dollars of transport costs over these years.

That will happen, but it'll happen faster. If carbon has a real cost, it doesn't have the cost that it should be.

When you, You've said that twice, so I'm not versed in this. What do you mean when you say carbon has a real cost?

People are not paying for what the cost of carbon is to society. I mean, if it was. Imagine if you were a steel mill or a cement industry and all of a sudden you would have to pay 2, $300 a ton for CO2 emissions, when traditionally it's between 750 kilos to a ton of CO2 for a ton of cement, and now all of a sudden you got to pay for that. That completely changes your model and maybe you will shift to geopolar cement, which has no CO2 emissions but doesn't use limestone.

So who charges this? Like, where does it come from? I worked in a. I ran a rock quarry and we dropped 22,000 tons of stone. We had a cement, we had blacktop, we had all that. Where would that. Is this just a tax that every country in the world has to tax, or is it. Where in the, where in the financial flow does that fee come in?

That would be. That would be a. Call it a carbon tax. So at the moment, in the past, the EU made a big mistake. They gave too much credits to the various industries. They didn't include the consumer in this process. So some industries, you know, said, oh, we're hurting, we're hurting. So they got way too much credit. Price of carbon dropped. But if carbon is a real cost, and if your cost carbon is significant and you know it's going to keep going up, you will adapt your process to reduce your carbon.

Yeah, but you've got to get a global consensus. And I'll use the US as a means of understanding consensus. As the world knows, from 1918 to 1920, that there are two things that stop a pandemic, that this one is wearing masks and two is physical distancing. Okay? And three years after that, once it was done, everybody went to normal. We're back together. But the difference was 50 million people died. Back then, one third of the world's population was infected today. Today, that would be 252.5 billion people infected and 250 million people dying. We can't even solve a small challenge that we could solve today. How are we going to institute, across an entire globe where everybody agrees to this carbon tax?

Well, I see that Europe was already starting on that process of creating a carbon tax and also taxing. And the airline industry now has agreed to a carbon tax. The shipping industry has agreed to create, creating a bunker fuel fund and a tax on bunker fuel to create investment for innovation. So it is possible things do happen. But I agree with you that it is very, very, very, very slow. If I look at Italy, we were just in Italy, they handle the crisis very well with much less resources than the United States in a much worse situation. And they got a handle on it. And even though it was quite dire, I was just there, I was quite impressed. So things are possible if the pain is great enough. And at the moment, the pain is not that great. There's a tremendous lack of leadership on these things. So I'm not that pessimistic about that. I just am pessimistic about the time frame. But I do believe that carbon, the price of carbon is going to go up. Every single major industry knows that. And they're all kind of positioning themselves. Okay, how fast is it going to go? If you know that your carbon, the cost of carbon for your emissions is going to go up and you can adapt to that, you'll do that. At the moment, there's a very simple solution to the cement industry, and they know it. A Frenchman developed geopolymer cement that has no CO2 emissions, zero. And he uses salt water.

Let me just add to those who are listening, cement is one of the largest contributors to CO2 in the modern world. Every time you lay down cement, you are adding a tremendous amount of CO2, the atmosphere. So if so you have a formula in your head and you keep on saying the past few minutes, if we take out time, but time is in the equation.

No, that's true.

So we can't take out time. So where do we want to be? Let me ask that question then. Where do we want to be? I mean, let's include Time in that formula, where do we want to be?

We want to be in a point that all products reflect their true cost. That's where you want to be. And that's from a policy point of view that products have to reflect the true cost. Labor should not be heavily taxed. Products should be heavily taxed. If products are heavily taxed, you'll design them to be repaired instead of throwing away. It's a policy issue as long as products don't reflect their true cost. It's not everybody's right to fly with EasyJet for nothing or Ryanair. Sorry, it's not.

But we're going to go the opposite way with COVID because companies around the world, countries around the world are policy driven to remain competitive. The euro right now is at an all time high. So how do we drop our costs so that we can compete against other markets? We have a developing nation, let's call it Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines. We want to compete on the global stage. We have to make sure that we do X. So we're going to allow these things to happen. We've seen this with the Paris Climate Accord in reaching targets. It's where do we want to be? I understand, but is that a realistic where do we want to be?

Yes, because the argument which we have in the Netherlands with one of the political parties who doesn't believe in climate change, don't focus on climate change. Talk about economic efficiency. If you want to survive the coming years, you're going to have to be massively resource efficient. That's what looking at climate does. It forces you to become much more resource efficient and the industrial policy much more resilient. Forget about the CO2 benefit. That's the cherry on the cake. But if you want to have an industry that can compete on a world stage, the best investment you can do is make sure that it's a fantastic place to work. People want to stay there. You don't have to spend a lot of money on HRM to attract the best and the brightest. You use very little resources, you have very little waste, you have very little energy input or, and you have very little complaint or legal fees against you. If you do all of that, you'll be much more profitable.

I'm laughing. I've worked the world. I don't know if I've ever seen a company like that.

I have, I have, I have. There are companies that, that, that are very civilized and have an innovate. There's a company that was, I forgot the name. They were part of Bayer and they were they were like the bad bank of the Bayer, I think it was Bayer basf. So they got rid of them. And then all of a sudden this company said, you know what? We're going to make our feedstock CO2, that's going to be our feedstock for. And we're going to use new chemical engineering and we're going to make all kinds of product from waste from CO2. And they were the ones that actually built, made the plastic that allowed that solar plane to fly around. Covestra, that was the name of Covestra. So here's a company, let me look at Worsted, which used to be dong Danish oil and natural gas company. And they went from oil and natural gas to completely wind and air, the world's largest offshore wind. So there's loads of companies that have reinvented themselves in a short time to be energy efficient.

I didn't, Sorry, I should have been clear. You listed enjoying place to work, legal. I mean, you gave a long, long, long laundry list. What are the statistics? 85% of the people in the world don't like the place they work at. That's been a challenge forever and ever and ever. The legal constructs that have been tossed up are going to be challenging across the board for many reasons when it comes to sustainability, HR compliance or what one side, what different parts of the world consider to be a great place to work or a. I'm losing the. I'm looking at this whole picture and I'm saying I don't see, I see companies doing things. I still use that T0 to T40.

Yeah. It doesn't mean that they don't exist because these companies do exist. But at the same time, if you look at Polaroid or Digital equipment, they were the sustainability champions of the day, but they all went bankrupt because they didn't make what people wanted. So it doesn't mean it's a guarantee of success. But I do realize that if you don't embrace the issue of sustainability on this human, on the social scale and on the environmental scale, you will have no future. Because if it was not profitable, if it wasn't really a value add, then none of these companies would be doing it. They wouldn't only be doing it for prior, some are doing it for pr. But the real challenge, what they're going to have is when they finally decide, hey, we have to make this serious. So. And they look for the best talent to attract. They can't find them because they started way too late. And that's going to be the war for talent and you want to attract the best and the brightest. You're not going to do it with a red BMW anymore. It's not going to work. It's going to work for a certain type of person that basically did an MBA and just wants a notch on their gun and they're going to leave you in one or two years anyway. And they're not really going to bring much value to the organization because they're busy with their career, not with your company. So I don't agree that it's.

I think I read the bottom. I read the. I read an article and then I try to read as many the comments below them and it doesn't matter if it's. I get the SCMP every day just because of Hong Kong and my living there. So I'm seeing a global perspective. Financial Times, all of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal. When I read the bottom of what's being said underneath and the disparity of thought or the range of thought, not disparity, the completely different polar opposites. But we could probably say there's a 360 polar opposite. There's people sitting on the holes circumference of the cup lid or however you want to look at it perspectively. There are just so many contrarian beliefs as to how something should be done to solve this. So I understand the carbon tax and I understand that we could put. If we could just do that. I'm trying to figure out a path. How do you do that then? I mean how. Not just talking. Not just you and I met over the fact that three companies gave their pitch and not one of them had a solution of how they're really measuring impact.

How do you. I decided quite a long time ago that I'm not going to engage in policy or working with governments because I don't have the patience for that. I chose only to work with irresponsible investors and criminals in the financial sector.

And I love how you've said that already because they're predictable.

Yeah. And that's what I like. And I will continue to focus only on those because the concentration of wealth is in a very small number of hands. So you don't need to change the behavior of that many people. I see how it was when we started. When I started and I published the first magazine in the Netherlands, maybe in Europe on sustainability and I would give a talk. The people who were listening were afraid to touch the magazine.

Yeah.

They were so frightened by the idea of the purpose of business is not just dying rich. So they didn't touch it. Now they all want to have a group selfie, you know, to show how cool they are. So that's a significant difference. And as we have not really changed our story, maybe we're better at telling it, but the story is the same, the same as it was 25 years ago. It's just there's more facts to back it up. And more and more I focus shifted focus away from, let's say pension funds and more toward other asset owners, particularly family offices, because they have small bureaucracies and they're entrepreneurs and they understand that.

So how many people in the world have to be influenced, not just you, through all these mechanisms?

Oh, not that many. I mean, it's more about the. If we ignore the retail space, individual investors that might invest 500 or 1,000, I'm focused on, let's say the top maybe 5 or 10,000 that have direct or indirect control because sometimes an advisor is very influential because they have the ear of the asset owner and we focus on them. And we have 40,000 who get our publications and that. And we keep trying to reach out and, you know, change our behavior.

So if we were to use the people that you had used earlier, Branson, Bezos, Gaines.

Are.

And the fact that they're saying one thing, measuring it a different way, the timelines are very different. The 50 years they'll be carbon neutral to 2050. Are those individuals changing or are they just using it like you said, for press releases and rah, rah, I think.

Those three are not my superheroes. I wouldn't call them. But at the same time, if you look at. Because you know, Gates gives lots of money to improve the health of people in Africa, where he invests most of his money to worsen the health of people in Africa. He invested heavily in the oil and gas sector. He invested heavily in large pharmaceuticals, who by chance always get to the contracts from his nonprofit Gates Foundation. So I'm not that impressed with his commitment to sustainability. He always spoke very, in a derogatory way about fuel free energy and renewable energy. Jeff Bezos was one of the early investors in nuclear fusion from a Canadian company, General Fusion. He put money into that years ago when it was really super high risk. Branson, I don't think he's for real at all. I think he's just a, you know, a playboy who loves to show off, cut ribbons, but not dig any holes. And not. And I don't think he has a very good reputation among entrepreneurs either. But there are many, many others. You Know, the Brennigmaier family does a lot of things. They were at one time the world's largest upstream solar investor, but they don't talk about it. The family office of Carrefour, of Jinko Solar, there are many, unfortunately, the ones that are doing the most, they're just talking the least, and the ones doing the least are talking the most. So you just have to filter out the noise and reach out to people that are willing to engage. And because I don't, I'm not trying to convince you to get a financial mandate to manage your assets. So we come across credible, and we've been doing it, you know, a long time. You don't need a lot of people. You don't need a lot of people.

And I'm not. I'm not saying it in that way. What I'm.

I.

There's a fear that I have, and it comes from my math that I've done, and when I do that timeline, I. I don't know if I shared this with you. When I showed up in Hong Kong, I was told that we would not be hit by any typhoons. They don't hit because of the islands. Okay. I was new to Hong Kong. I thought, okay, that's a reasonable explanation. And in Hong Kong, we measure the rain by a measurement called per centimeters per hour. So you'd have a T1 or a T3, and if you got up to a T8, or you had this black range of sheets coming down. But T10 was the ultimate. And in all the years I was there, as far as back as people can remember, they didn't have any T10s. But my eighth year, we had two T10s, and my ninth year we had two T10s. And I remember I was sitting next to a guy who protects rhinoceroses and elephants. And if you saw the news, you saw the windows shattered, but that was poor construction. But you saw water coming over the edges of Hong Kong. The guy said to me, david, you know what I do for a living? I said, no. He says, I protect. I insure boats, Yachts, big boats. And he said that the eye of the cyclone was. The typhoon was 100 miles away and it was low tide. If it was high tide, the water would have been 7 to 10 meters higher, about 20 to 30ft higher. And all the boats were saved only because there was about a foot left or 30cm difference on the pylons to hold the boats in. So this type. My fear is that it's a time issue. And how do we Accelerate that so that our children and children's children can have at least normalcy that we've known.

Here's an example of super acceleration. Okay? I was having. I was invited by Morningstar to this conference. I did that at dinner. Sitting down next to me was Donald Trump. Not the real Donald Trump, the Donald Trump type. He was German. He hated renewable energy, hated it with a passion. I mean, he hated everything about sustainability. He was everything. Whatever I said, he just threw it back at. Garbage, nonsense, stupidity. I'd never invest a dime. Opposite me was the head of NNIP, which is an insurance asset manager in the Netherlands. 2,300 billion euros and assets and one of the largest ESG fund managers who always beat their benchmark. So I said to the guy next to me, the Donald Trump guy said, I don't know, maybe it's going to take an hour, maybe it's going to take a week, maybe it's going to take a month or a year. But I guarantee you within a short period of time, you will change your attitude towards sustainable investment. And when I introduce him to NNIP and he hurts, heard of this big brand and they're beating the benchmark and that he immediately said, when can we meet to discuss fund management? And that was less than maybe 30 minutes. So that's the advantage of the predictability of the alpha males in the financial sector is that it's not that hard to get behavioral change if you get the access.

If you can get the. And you've already got access now because of the tbli.

Yeah, I have some. I would say I have some access and I try to improve that, but I don't force doors open. That's not going to work with this type of group. And those, they can check me out, they can speak to other people. I said, rubenstein's okay. He's a pain in the neck about pushing this ESG and impact, but he's okay, well.

You'Re. I'm going to swing it. Back then you said that your metric, the metrics are wrong, the standards, all these challenges that are flawed. What have you done? Do you have a better metric system that you're using when you go in?

I'm not a, I'm not a financial analyst or a research person. I don't have that nerd quality to do that. But I do have some people call.

That normal, by the way.

Yeah, that's okay. But we have something called 10 TBLI expert network. So these are 4 to 500 independent uber experts on everything related to sustainability. Metrics, climate, carbon, agriculture, food, water, gender, transportation, healthcare, energy, anything. So, and we engage those individual experts when clients come to us and say, hey, I need, you know this, I need that, I need this. So we're able to access the best and the brightest with a specific question. And there are dozens and dozens of new AI initiatives about getting true sustainable insight into companies, and that is only getting better. There's one company that presented TBLI that is analyzing millions of Chinese companies and giving insight into their true sustainable performance using artificial intelligence. There's another organization that I know that is also. I know the people behind it and they're doing a very good job. So we don't. I would not be. I wouldn't have the patience. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a research person. My partner is a financial nerd. Due diligent compliance in that. And she's very good at filtering out the bullshit and the noise. So we're able to access the solutions if someone is serious. But in general, it's really not that hard to do. I mean, I remember the largest green bank in the Netherlands and he was always saying, listen, it's really not that hard to do in determining if this is really going to improve people's lives. What you see a lot, unfortunately, and particularly. I'm sorry, I know you're American. Americans are the worst. It's okay. I mean, you, you should.

Don't say, you say Americans.

Oh, my God. This one organization called Unreasonable, I think it was called Unreasonable Institute. On their website they talk about how they've mobilized trillions and billions and hundreds of millions of people lives. And I looked at some of the companies that they published there and I said, I know this company. I don't think you raised a penny for them. And I checked with them and says, you know, this type of rubbish. Or a hedge fund manager in impact who's been doing it eight years, and she claims we've impacted the lives of 3 million people. So I asked her, okay, how big is your fund? $2 million. So I said, $2 million. And you've impacted the lives of millions of people in emerging markets. Isn't that a bit of a stretch?

Because I think the bigger question should be, this is always my first. Let me, let me ask you something. Have you ever worked in Bangladesh? What do you mean? You talk about Bangladesh like you know, Bangladesh. Have you ever worked at. No, no, no, but I've read a lot. Or have you worked in Indonesia? No, no, no. Most of the individual. It's a big world. And.

My wife, my wife who worked in Bhutan, everybody was bugging her to be a B corp. And she was saying, you know, your model of measurement is ridiculous. You don't even look at, you have never idea what it's, what it's like to work in a frontier market. You have no idea. And the idea that you don't even measure how well you engage with the community as a metrics is immediately a red flag. So you're right. Most of these people don't know what it's like to work in these communities, but they throw these figures because they all want to show how much pseudo impact they had by throwing out these numbers. And it's great for cutting the ribbon, but it's meaningless because it gives a very bad impression because real investors see that and says, what? You raised trillions.

And that's where while you're speaking with me, there's some confusion or pushback because I'm having lived in Europe, having lived in Asia, and I see the global challenges of these comments, not just from Americans. There is a large American position on this. Yet I've seen this all over the world and I've seen it in so many startup pitches that I have been a judge or in Lithuania or in China or in Hong Kong or in South Africa, wherever I've been. There's just so much commentary about how much people are fixing the world and I'm lost. What are you reading? What do you. What are you smoking? Yeah, I. There's a guy, it's in the first part of Paid to Think. There's a guy that I've good friends with, that I worked with, Mr. Park. He's a Korean out of Hong Kong. He tells a story that he was looking for a place to do business and he was a tent manufacturer, T E N T S. He controls about 60% of all tents manufactured in the world today.

Wow.

Yeah, Great guy. Amazing guy. Hard nosed, definitely Korean style. And through a long story, we ended up working together. But one of the stories he told me in the beginning that really got me hooked on to him was he said he was looking for a place to keep costs down, to economically be viable. And he looked all over the Asia Pacific region and he landed in Chittagong in Bangladesh. And as he was driving through the streets, he said to me, this story was, I realized that I could have an economic advantage here. The cost is going to be low, it's going to be challenging. Electric supply, all of that's going to be very difficult. This was years ago, before they had the empire, the zones. He was the first company in that zone that has about 800 companies today. But he said, but I looked around at the people and I said I could make a difference here. And when you fast forward, his factories are wonderful factories to work in and he gives one of the things, he gave out rice, he takes care of people. He has 30,000 employees today. Something somewhere in there and he's just, he was contributing back to, to his decision to be in Bangladesh was to give a higher standard of living for the people that he worked with. And there are people who are doing these initiatives that you never hear about. They're not, they're not in the news, but they are out there. And I do, I do see that. But my, again, my pushback is okay, not enough. We're not hitting the Paris court agreement.

Flaunting the un that is true and it is a great frustration of mine and that people still want to put out these stupid press releases about things or we're going to, in 20 years we're going to be at this level, you know, let's get somewhere in a year. You know, let's put, put it in the microwave and speed this up.

If there's a, there's an ethics, there's a moral, there's a position. I don't know if humankind, the pandemic is one of those examples, if humankind today is ready to make those changes. So let's get on and that's a whole nother topic. So I'm sorry I said it, but I had to say it.

I agree with you, it is frustrating. But hey, you know, I don't know if you have kids, but try getting your 16 year old son to clean up his room.

Yeah, I've got a 26 year old and a 27 year old.

Yeah. Okay, so it's. Everything is hard.

When you hear about, for example, diversity as a topic. I always, one of the go to's on mine is okay, let me ask you something. What's the most diverse organization in the world today? There are more of them than any other organization. A legal structure that's built and they. Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I say marriage. There is a male and a female in a heterosexual relationship. There are others. I say, but there's more of these than any other in the world. Are you telling me that putting a male and a female together because of gender, they're going to improve performance? They have a new product development babies, they have to put their financials together. Do they manage them well? And if you really look at them, they're failures. 50% or whatever the number is, end or unhappy or whatever the numbers are. So the challenge becomes, how do we get human nature to understand what is considered to be a normal future? And I think there are enough people out there, my opinion, my research, enough people think that tomorrow will be okay.

It's.

We should do this, but tomorrow will be okay.

I'm, I'm, you know, I still, I'm still optimistic about things in the long term. I'm kind of pessimistic in the short term. You know that that is true because I just, I just see we're going too slow. We need to go faster than the music. And it's, it is, it is a kind of a frustration about that, but.

Well, don't be completely frustrated. I'm not trying to get you frustrated. I'm trying to bring a point out.

It's okay. It's okay. I'm a very stubborn person. My wife or son.

You do know I'm going to talk to you about Project Moonhot and how to address these. I do believe there's a possible solution. We're just not going to do it here. I'm, I'm more. I'm trying to be pragmatic. And someone said to me the other day, david, but you can't talk about these things because people don't want to hear them. So. But how do you solve a challenge if you're not real honest with where we really are? You sit down with a person who's talking about cleaning the oceans, who's done it for 10 years, 20 years, and you say privately, how's it working for you? And his words I remember were, it's not. We're losing the battle on cleaning the oceans. Okay, that's, that's. I can stay. But don't tell me we're doing an amazing job.

No, that's true. I think that some things are getting better, but the shit is piling up faster than we're cleaning it up, which is the.

You know about the Chinese dump. You probably read the Chinese made a dump for. They made a dump that's supposed to last for 50 years and they filled it in 25. I mean, that's literally, as you said, the shit piling up. So let me give me a sense of. We're on 4 and 5 here, 25 years. So tell me what's actually been happening so that I can. If you have metrics, if you have Some real examples, and I think you can kind of tie in the pushing of the ESG and the forces that are pushing on ESG and impact.

Okay, well, first of all, the acceptance is far greater than it's ever been before. The acceptance of looking at money as a way of improving society and investment, that is at a far greater level than ever in the history, I think, of mankind moving away from philanthropy, which is a very small. You're using 5%, which is subsidized by taxpayers, instead of using philanthropy as a way of improving society and the environment, but using investment, which is using 100% of the money, rather than 5% of the interest, which is the philanthropic approach. So that's. That's a major improvement. People accepting, looking at all of the environmental, social, governance issues of a company, whether for risk mitigation or better management, that is more universally accepted now than it was 25 years ago. That's for sure. The number of money flows going into liquid and illiquid assets has never been higher. The methodology for measuring is far better than the O.J. simpson method of self assessment with control by ignorance, with some new technology approaches of what should we be measuring? Because I don't know if you know the Global Reporting Initiative.

No, I don't know any of these things.

Okay. So the Global Reporting Initiative was trying to create a model for universal reporting of companies on their sustainable performance. And there are always complaints about it because they had dozens and dozens of key performance indicators. And I would always ask them, why are you asking a company in Finland to spend so much time on diversity when there's only white Finns living in that entire town? You know, what is the point? So they were. There was a lot of pushback. And also many people were not using the Global Reporting Initiative as a dashboard from managing the company. They were using it as a way of informing stakeholders, you know, to keep them quiet. So that still exists. I think that more and more companies, entrepreneurs, C suite managers, millennials, are realizing that there are ways of running a business that can put back other than just philanthropy and that can improve society and the environment. So a lot of these things has gotten better. But as it's gotten better, we've also learned more. So we're not willing to accept inferior behavior or less. You know, it's good enough. We look at where we were 25 years. Look, who are we now? Be quiet. We should be happy where we have. I'm not. I think that we can do far better. The same way as your project. Moonshot is not happy with the status quo and wants to make a fundamental quantum leap to address everything at the same time.

Okay, so the are there TBLI is one of them. What are the other major forces that you. Using the globe as an entire space of options. What are the other major? Two, three or four organizations that are really doing an amazing job of making change, pushing this?

Very few. There's a lot of organizations now that have come up like PRI and GIN and EVPN and evpa. But it's too much about politics. It's too much about exclusivity, not inclusivity. You see it. You can always tell an organization when they do a webinar, how inclusive is this webinar? And do they allow people to chat or is it all blocked out? Do they allow people to connect with each other or do they control that? Because these are placement agents that don't want you to meet anybody. So I think there are a lot of organizations that intend to do things. We're looked at as the George Carlin of the impact investing space. We'll speak the radical truth because I don't have any external shareholders, so I don't really care about that. And I follow pretty much the Groucho Marx approach to membership is that I'll never join a club that would ever accept me as a member. So I think, I don't think there are many because you have to be not politically correct. You have to be willing to tell people, you know, David, I'm really sorry, but your children are quite ugly. And you know what I mean that. Not that your children are ugly, but that you have to say what you're doing is not helping. It's nice that we have a group hug and a group selfie all together, but we don't need that. We need fundamental commitment and change. And unfortunately, in many of these institutions, it's people want to show the membership card to the fitness club without getting on them the equipment.

So to answer to the. Answer the question, when you say not many, are there two others like you or there and they don't have to be like you?

Let's see. I know many individuals that share our passion and mission. When I think of organizations that maybe the organization the China SIF in. In China, my friend Pei Win, I think that he's really trying to work, working in a very difficult position in Beijing and Shanghai and others. Not easy trying to push the equation, understanding the politics. If I think of other organizations that the Spanish Social Investment Forum, wonderful people trying to do a great job. I think my friend At CAIA in Hong Kong, Joanne Murphy, I think she does a great job. So I think a lot of the, most of the people who are happy to be a network partner with us, who actually feel comfortable, you know, having them as a partner and appreciate our humor at the same time, our passion are there. But a lot of the larger mainstream ones I always have, you know, difficulty with because it's too exclusive and it's about inclusiveness, it's about money commitment. It's not about talking about it. I don't care if somebody does want to do impact for whatever they say it doesn't make money or it doesn't really make an impact. I don't believe in it. That's fine. That's a legitimate point and that's your. I just get tired of a lot of these organizations that talk about it it forever. I think Steve Waygood's organization that he's working on getting large sovereign funds to really commit vast sums of money to climate is spectacular. I think Elsa Powell in Hong Kong, what she's doing with wealth managers and analyzing unsustainable performance, I think she, she's quite amazing. Wing Ah, who's pushing blue ocean. So there are many heroes. There are no angels, but many heroes.

So taking on the comment that you made that you're willing to call my children ugly, United nations sustainability targets goals often brought up use so often it's kind of absurd. What's your thoughts?

I was impressed with how quickly it became the flavor of the month because people have been going through so many. Every year there's a new issue that corporates had to deal with and people have to understand corporates cannot deal with every year a new issue. They have a lot of stuff to deal with. If you keep throwing a new issue every year a new one, they're just going to shut down.

Yep, I agree.

And the fact that, that the, the, the SDGs became the flavor of the month, I was very, very, very, very surprised how quickly it became. And then others were saying, we are, we've signed. There was a lot of stupidity around it because people who were not even fund managers were saying, we signed the commitment to the UN SDGs. I said, what the hell does that mean? You don't manage money. Who cares if you signed it? It's another ribbon cutting exercise. And I think that some of the SDGs are really important. Whether someone can handle, you know, all 17. We were working with a wonderful woman who was addressing nine of the 17 SDGs with the world's largest UN SDG real estate project in Thailand. Fantastic initiative. Building a urban center in Bangkok where people will become healthy by not alienating them from nature. Having the whole property 50% new, full mature forest, intergenerational, no aircon, reducing CO2 emissions 40%, et cetera, et cetera. So as a kind of yardstick, you know, quite, quite amazing with all of the things that the ESG community was going through and now the SDGs and it's become accepted by a lot of pension funds who are looking to say our funds are now SDG compliant or things like that. But there's, you know, there's a lot of. We were once hired by. This is a true story, actually. We were hired by a fund manager in Denmark and he said to us, I raised 600 million euro and we're going to be the best UN SDG fund manager in the world. Psych said, good. And I was gonna hang up. He said, no, no, you don't understand. We don't have anything. What do you mean we don't have anything? We don't have any reporting mechanism. We don't know how to report, what to report. Could you help us? So for the people in who understand Yiddish a bit, I knew this guy was a schnorah and that he wasn't going to pay anything for us. So I introduced him to my friend who spoke the language and was one of the leading authorities on reporting and not a judgmental person, which not like me. So put them together, forgot about it and just left it alone. And I was looking at, on the Internet, about a year and a half later, I said, wow, look at this. This company wins the annual Private equity award for the best UN SDG reporting. So I thought, wow, we must be a genius or the awards are meaningless or a combination of the two. But it was interesting that he got the money quickly based on the fact using that SDG as a kind of brand or model that people wanted to align with that. So I was impressed that coming up with a new way of looking of how money should be allocated got so much traction.

It is an amazing entree into the ecosystem of the world that how quickly individuals around the world point to it and it goes back to your original, how flawed it is. And what's the rah rah and what's the press release and how you can get that night? I can't tell you the country I was in. I had to give a presentation to a group of about 250 people and they had a consultant come in and do a report of how they should change their city and what they should do. And in there I said this on stage, I said, you've been basically told you have to do all 17 SDG initiatives by the United Nations. The size of your city, the number, the amount of resources you would need to do what this consulting firm had advised would mean you'd get nothing accomplished in the next 50 years. And what consultants were using that as their benchmark. Why don't we tell everybody to do all of these? I said, you pick the few and you'd really do well at those because you do not have the capital to be able to make the changes that are being indoctrinated. So, yes, I would say it was a very positive for the world to have the discussion around. And here you give me an example. Did he actually have great reporting this company?

Better? It was better, but he, because he didn't really want to allocate the resources to do it really well with the person I recommended. It was adequate for what he, his, his LPs wanted, but he was not willing to spend the money on internal capacity building. And that'll probably because, you know, it's what the LPs are demanding. You know, if they're happy with Coke Light, why give them Coke Classic?

There's that economic side. So what about sustainability?

It's not that much more money, though. It's really a mindset, you know, because what they're making, managing 600 million, so you're getting 12 million a year in fees and then upside, so, you know, you can, you can afford it. But it was a, it was an example of how it became so popular that could raise lots of money from this.

That goes back to our earlier conversation. I don't know. My personal take is can you set up metrics that actually throughout an entire ecosystem of an organization and their initiatives be able to clearly show what the true impact is. And there's a, there's a video, a TEDx I think it was out of. A guy did it in Hungary, this gentleman out of. Where is he? He's out of California. Los Angeles, I believe. I don't remember his name. His whole life he's been fighting for windmills, he's been fighting for solar, he's been fighting for every environmental cause. And he shared on stage where to put up solar farms to feed a city with power. You'd have to destroy thousands and thousands of trees and land just to get enough energy. He said he remembers having to go take animals out of babies and Chiclets. And I think they were turtles out of their homes just because they were going to be bulldozed. And then he talked about windmills and how they were actually harming flights of birds and killing larger birds. And he said, I hate to say this, after 30 or 20, whatever the years are, I don't have the specifics. He said, let me show you all of the economic or the damage that comes out of one type of energy. He showed this one building and he said, this is nuclear. It's small footprint, high energy. You're not going to have solar panels shipped off to a third world country in years to come because we don't know how to be able to dismantle them and take out all the poisonous lead and everything else. And he said, I hate to say it, but out of all my years of research, I've come to the conclusion that if we just put in a nuclear power plant, we will be safer and will be more environmentally sustainable. And I was like, okay, so are we going in the right direction? Which comes down to this measurement. How do you measure and what measurements would there be? So let's jump to the next one. I think this is a place you probably have number six, sustainability investment. Overview of the true opportunities. Share with me what you're saying.

Oh, the opportunities are huge. Just looking at if we take very boring space, zero emission real estate, new and retrofit. So buildings already existing or new buildings. One of the easiest way to address CO2 emissions. I remember we had Anthony Malkin who was the owner of the Empire State Building. He spoke at TBLI and he was not an environmental superhero. He was not. He was not. It was just. He was a finance guy, but he did the math and he realized that he could dramatically improve the value of the building, reduce emissions.

So.

So he did the world's largest green retrofit. It was $525 million that he funded himself. Triple glazing, used 95% of all the old glass from the original building. Reduced CO2 emissions, reduced energy, improved the air quality, raised the price of the rentals and ultimately sold the building or through a trust and just proving the value there. So zero emission real estate, public transport, infrastructure. Particularly if you're looking to decarbonize your portfolio with little to no risk. Fuel free energy. I hate using the word renewable energy. I just prefer to say it's fuel free. Why would you want to pay for fuel if you don't have to? Carbon sequestering either red plus or blue carbon invest. And also in the two largest employers in the world. I'M not a big tech investor fan because I think if you're looking, if you're concerned about jobs, hospitality, the second largest employer in the world and small scale agriculture is number one. You know, look at that. Most of the time they're not using lots of technology. And hospitality dwarf the entire tech industry worldwide for employment, water, affordable health care, climate resiliencies and a living wage. I mean, these are all directions that you can allocate resources without massive technology risk. I'm not talking about nuclear fusion at room temperature or this new initiative to reduce CO2 emission for the beverage industry 85%. I was blown away by this. And it works, it works. You could eliminate all of the bottles of beer, juices, sodas, sparkling water from all the supermarkets. Don't have to do that anymore. Don't have to schlep it there, schlep it back, bring it back, Fantastic. Very simple. So I think there's lots of low hanging fruit if you're interested. If you're not, okay. But you know this idea that Everybody's always making 30% returns on everything they do, that's not sustainable. That's also not true. I.

My mind races to all of these different industries or sectors that you're talking about. And yes, these are to some degree, some of these are not sexy.

No, no, not at all.

The fuel free energy to some degree is, that's a big topic of how would we reduce the fuel costs. But the public transport is one of the things that I, we tend to want to help the people who are underprivileged or underserved. And so therefore you use these energy systems to go to individuals who don't have means and you're trying to help them. And my take is why don't you serve the people with means first? Why don't you get those kids who have money onto a light rail and get them to see the value of it? Because those individuals in those communities, they are the ones who have influence politically and financially. So if they can see the value of helping their children get to where they want to go and they could use it, well, then they're probably going to better understand the value of using it in other places. So public transport, Hong Kong, the mtr as you brought up is just an amazing, amazing organization.

Very well, very well organized. But even, you know, fuel free energy, I mean, people forget that there are two senators for every state in the union. Every state has two senators where you've got 100,000 people living there or 50 million, it doesn't matter. You've got two senators and the ranchers and the farmers, they own the wind rights. And if you could put 500,000 wind turbines on all of these ranches and farms and they would generate income plus you would have the political clout of these states in pushing fuel free energy. Personally, I don't want Harry Schwartz with the small shop around the corner running that operation. I want GE or Exxon Mobil or BP running that. You need these large energy companies. They can reinvent themselves to become fuel free energies. But believe it or not, I used to work on oil rigs and it's very easy just opening the pipeline and getting your bonus. Yeah, you don't have to do very much, you don't have to change any infrastructure. So it's unfortunate because there's a great opportunity for them also for all of this states in Tornado alley, Kansas, Nebraska and all of that. And they can provide a great deal of the energy of the US with battery backup. So there's a lot of opportunity here. It's not a lose situation. And there's much more jobs in fuel free energy than there is in the oil and gas sector.

But if we go to Russia and we have 149 million people and 1.2 million trillion GDP, they're very rural except for Moscow and St. Petersburg. There's challenges there. You've got places around the world that are just going to be challenged. These are great initiatives. Yet when we take this tier down from Europe, United States, China, in certain portions, some of these more industrialized nations, it becomes a much more challenging environment to make that global change.

Yeah, that's true.

So let's the last one you had on consequences of not embarking on it. What happens if we don't? I'm assuming that's where you're going.

Probably drown. Probably drown. I mean most of Florida will disappear. It's pretty flat anyway. It's right along coast most of the coastal areas. You know, you're not going to be able to build walls to protect Manhattan. No, forget it. I mean I lived in lower Manhattan. A little bit of a storm in the whole of south, the sea south, the seaport is gone. It's ridiculous. So if you're not going to address this move to the mountains, you know, if you don't really give a shit about anybody. And I'm sure that all of the climate deniers will all be putting in their claims for the government to bail them out. So it's going to be a very.

Rough ride that lends to political unrest that Leads to wars, that nationalism. Indonesia. 17,500 islands. What happens? Sea level, water rise. They did a storm, a mapping of what will happen in Australia as the waters rise and they become warmer. And you get a storm, one area, then another on the coastals. And within 40 years you were having. The storm would come, but within a year or two, you'd hear it again and again. So you cannot maintain that. So if we look at coastal borders all over the world, this becomes a challenge.

Yeah, so it's, you know, and maybe that will wake people up at the moment, unfortunately. I know people hate hearing this. Nobody in positions of power is really suffering. Who's suffering? Some small islands in the South Pacific that might disappear. You know, be realistic. Most people don't care. Very few people who live there, they don't have any important materials that anyone needs. So people are willing to, you know, ride it out until it becomes really expensive. But even then, you know, if it really becomes so bad, how are you going to turn that around that quickly in changing your behavior and reducing your CO2 emissions?

How often do you get up and say, why do I keep on doing this?

Often. And then I get have a nice conversation with, you know, a friend or somebody and it says, oh, okay, this is working. Or people say, you know, you really made a difference in my life. I raised money or whatever, so it's always a kind of, why bother? And then, hey, we're getting through. Sometimes it's not about grand slams, to put it in baseball terms, it's about bunts and singles, sometimes a double, but it's not the big. It's not the big big. When I always hope one day it's going to be just overwhelming and everybody will want to do that and everybody will want to engage us or invite us to, you know, to speak. And sometimes I wonder, is anybody listening to this? And then you have a conversation with someone, you have no idea of the influence that you've had because people don't tell you. You brought up a very good point when we last spoke, I think was a few weeks ago, and you were mentioning about trying to measure the impact that we've had. And I said, I wish I had like 50 students to reach out to everybody and how to incentivize all those people to tell back. And now we've been getting video testimonials from people who told us how they've impact that you've made. You were the first one to make a great one, which we tried to show to people. You can do this if you want to do it, you know, so that's, I guess, what keeps me going. But it is a struggle regularly. You know, it's like, maybe not every day, but it's regular where I saying, why bother? People don't care. Nobody wants to stick their hand out to give someone to help or be generous or whatever. And it's a discussion that I have often with my family, particularly with my wife, you know, why bother? People are just so selfish and not willing to share. And then there's just so much abundance. But. And then you get a conversation with a mensch who is, you know, very grateful and does want to share and help. So it's. It'd be nice if it was most of the time, but the few times that it does happen is. Gives me an energy boost.

I don't want to get the impression that it's a negative. And the. I don't. My. I'm having. I have those same moments. I have to ask myself, why do I do. I don't know if it's to help every single person on Earth. I don't know. And I don't consider myself. I never say I'm in the impact space. I don't say that. I don't say I'm the ESG space. I know the implications of the things I'm doing will impact that, but that's not my core. It's. I can't say you're making a difference. I think you're doing your share to make that change happen. If I were. If you were to tell me, David, this is one thing that you could do, what would it be? Me or you would tell me? You're talking to me now, David, is there one thing that would help me to understand more, to change more to do more to influence?

You did. You did last time you made a video interview with me and you sent that to me right afterwards. And you brought up some very important points of how to monetize these relationships, how to show the metrics to people that, you know, you really have to quantify it for these alpha male nerds who love to see figures. And you did. So.

I wasn't going in that direction. For those who are listening in, we had a strong. A long conversation. I don't know if it was long. We had a great conversation about TBLI and meeting new needs and using students or video or other areas to influence. And what Robert's talking about is the fact that I opened up, I think, some new ways of thought to change the paradigm, to help move things forward. And yes, I did create a video immediately, not because I had suggested it, because I thought you deserved it. So I thank you for coming and being with me today and, and being on the program. I love the honesty. I know there's a lot more that we can talk about. So thank you, Robert, for just being you, for being a friend and for participating in an open dialogue like this.

My pleasure, my pleasure. It's always a joy. And I look forward to having you speak at TBLI about your simple solution with little to no effort of addressing climate.

There are, that's a whole other discussion that we could have for those of you who are listening in. The conversation today, I know, went in a variety of different channels. They always do. And I think it was interesting for me to hear a lot of the honesty from Robert. So I'm hoping that as you were listening in, you made some subtle shifts in the way you were looking at ESGs or you're looking at impacting or you're looking at even the United nations. You might look up, you might not have ever looked up their initiatives so that you could see some of other people's thoughts as some of the changes that need to be made. The suggestion that I would have is just like in the very beginning, and I think Robert said it well, is a lot of this space is deeply flawed and there's a lot of rah, rah. So when you do read it, step back. When you do hear something, step back, do some of your own research, find out, is this what it means to be and be deeper? Someone, some organization says, we're helping this. There's always a consequence for doing one thing in another direction. So make sure you're looking at things, perspectives and thoughts in a holistic manner because quite literally our future relies on it. So as redefining tomorrow is, we're looking to redefine tomorrow. And I hope you learned something today that'll change and make a difference in your life and the lives of others. And Robert, what is the one best way to get in touch with you?

The easiest is just look on LinkedIn. I mean, you can send me an email. I respond to all my email like Noam Chomsky does. So you can just look up Robert Rubenstein on TBLI LinkedIn. That's the easiest. I do respond there or you can send me a mail robertbligroup.com okay, that's.

A great way to get a hold of you. And for all of you, if you're looking to get ahold of me, you can reach me@davidavidgoldsmith.com I'm on Instagram at mrdavidgoldsmith. There's Goldsmith at Twitter. I am on LinkedIn. If you know the forward slash, it's David AllenGoldsmith, but David Goldsmith, you'll see that. And then I'm also on Facebook. So this is a great conversation. Robert, again, once again, thank you. My pleasure to everybody. I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.